Tembec shuts down permanently its Smooth Rock Falls pulp mill

TEMISCAMING, QC, Dec. 5 /CNW Telbec/

Tembec today announced the permanent closure of its market pulp mill located in Smooth Rock Falls, Ontario. The mill had been indefinitely idled at the end of July 2006. After a thorough analysis of the current situation, the Company has concluded that a sustainable and secure long-term operation at this site is not possible. A total of 185 unionized employees and 44 staff will be affected.

"The vintage and scale of this mill and its manufacturing costs relative to global competition, including the availability of affordable fibre, were all key factors in this decision," said Yvon Pelletier, Tembec Executive Vice President and President of the Pulp Group. "After thoroughly reviewing current and future economic conditions, we have made the difficult decision to permanently close the mill."

"Decisions of this nature are never easy to make, and Tembec regrets the impact of today's announcement on all employees, their families and the Smooth Rock Falls community," said Mr. Pelletier. "Tembec will proceed with the mill's closure according to applicable laws, regulations and the collective agreement."

"The Company intends to act in a manner that will ensure that employees receive their severance pay in the next few weeks.," said Mr. Pelletier. "The Company will also take appropriate measures, including the provision of counselling and support services for affected employees."

As a result of this announcement, an unusual charge of $31 million relating to pension, severance and other items will be recorded in the quarter ending December 30, 2006.

Tembec is a large, diversified and integrated forest products company. With operations principally located in North America and in France, the Company employs approximately 9,000 people. Tembec's common shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol TBC. Additional information on Tembec is available on its website at www.tembec.com (+)

Galls are ugly growths, but they don't kill your tree

Sault Star (ON)|Wed 28 Jun 2006
Byline: Katherine Nystrom

You may have noticed wart- and/or pile-like growths mostly on the upper surface of your maple leaves, especially on silver and red maple.

These growths are actually galls and are caused by the presence of tiny mites, called eriophyed mites, feeding on the surface of the affected leaf. The galls, which provide food and shelter to the developing stages of the mites, are green when newly formed but gradually turn red and finally blacken over time. If these galls are numerous they can deform a leaf and mar the overall appearance of the tree. These galls, even when numerous, will not kill a tree. However, when they are plentiful on a young tree growth development can be slowed.

Several species of eriophyid mites cause galls on maple leaves. The maple bladdergall mite, Vasates quadripedes, can be found on silver and red maples. Finger-like galls seen on sugar maple are the maple spindlegall mite, Vasates aceriscrumena. The red pile mite gall, caused by the mite Aceria elongatus, can be found on either side of the leaves of various maples and is felt-like in appearance.

The microscopic adults overwinter, or spend the winter, in niches on the trunk and branches of maple trees. When the leaf buds begin to expand the adult mites move to the leaves and feed there. Abnormal cell development is initiated and as a result the female becomes enclosed in a characteristic structure or gall. Eggs are laid in the galls; they hatch, feed through several larval stages, and become adults in a matter of weeks. These adults leave the gall and may initiate other galls if suitable developing leaf tissue is present.

The number of galls fluctuates widely from year to year. Except in young or newly planted trees, the loss of leaf surface is insignificant and control is unnecessary. If need be the early handpicking of damaged leaves, which are frequently most common on the lower branches, will help to keep populations down. If it is desirable to prevent damage on young or newly transplanted maple trees, dormant oil can be used before bud-break in the early spring. Dormant oil should not be used on Japanese or sugar maple to avoid injury.

REMEMBER: Insecticides, by their very nature, are designed to control insects. Because of this, persons using insecticides must ensure they use them correctly. Always read the product label prior to using the product. Ensure that the product is registered for the target insect and follow label specifications for mixing, application rates, and disposal and safety precautions.

The preceding information is provided by the Sault Ste. Marie laboratory of the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada, where Kathryn Nystrom is employed as an insect identification officer. While we cannot guarantee a response to each inquiry, we will make every effort to respond to readers= questions, either through this column or individually. Direct inquiries to: Tree Talk, c/o Communications Officer, Great Lakes Forestry Centre, P.O. Box 490, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario P6A 5M7. Visit our Web Site at http://www.glfc.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/

The Future of Tropical Forests

Source: Biological Conservation Newsletter

Tropical rainforests are among the most species rich regions of the world. If current deforestation and habitat loss continues, a mass extinction of forest species is predicted in these areas. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientist S. Joseph Wright and Helene Muller-Landau from the University of Minnesota have recently conducted a survey of human population trends and forest cover.

Wright and Muller-Landau use present-day relationships between forest cover and population density and United Nations population projections to predict future forest cover for tropical African, American and Asian countries. United Nations population projections generally predict that human population growth rates will decline and that urbanization will intensify. Wright and Muller-Landau predict future forest cover using both an optimistic scenario based on rural populations alone and a pessimistic scenario based on total (rural plus urban) populations.

Continental trends suggest that deforestation will decrease and a larger area will remain forested in the Americas where population growth is slowing most rapidly and urbanization continues to increase. The outlook is not as optimistic in Asia and Africa. Asian forests are already quite diminished and populations are growing at a higher rate. In Africa, however, population growth overall and particularly in rural areas continues to increase, and net deforestation is expected to continue.

This research suggests that global deforestation will decrease, regeneration of forested areas will increase and a mass extinction of rainforest species can be avoided. Wright and Muller-Landau hope their research will stimulate more sophisticated predictions of future forest cover. In the meantime, further research is needed to establish the threat to individual species and determine which global, regional or local factors may influence these threats. This research will improve the ability to evaluate and manage human influences on forest species.(+)

Mountain Pine Beetel: 'Natural disaster in slow motion'

B.C.'s pine beetles could infest forests all across Canada, MLA warns

DAWN WALTON | GLOBE AND MAIL

WILLIAMS LAKE, B.C. -- John Rustad said he didn't want to sound "all doom and gloom," but as he preached in an airplane hangar filled with officials from Alberta, the British Columbia MLA warned of an apocalypse.

An unusual blip showed up on provincial radar systems a few years ago, he said. It was a cloud of mountain pine beetles -- pests that have chewed through much of his province's interior forests and lopped at least $6-billion from the economy.

"If this wall gets to Alberta, this thing can go right across the country. You won't be able to stop it," said Mr. Rustad, who worked in the forest industry for 20 years around Prince George, the area he now represents in the legislature.

"It's not every day you get to see a natural disaster in slow motion. That's what we have here," he told the group.

British Columbia's beetle problem became an epidemic in short order.

In 1999, almost 165,000 hectares of forest were infested. By 2005, the number jumped to 8.7 million hectares.

Alberta is hoping to avoid a similar fate in its battle against the beetle. The bug has flown across the Rocky Mountains and has popped up along the eastern slopes from the southwest corner of Alberta all the way to an area north of Jasper National Park.

Industry and government officials, who met in Calgary over the weekend to find ways to protect 2 million hectares of Alberta's forests from the blight, had flown to Williams Lake, which is at the heart of B.C.'s pine beetle outbreak, to see the devastation first-hand.

From the air, forests of trees were a sea of red, orange and grey. The palette was broken by the occasional green tree and swaths of stumps where stands had been cut in a bid to prevent the spread of beetles to other timber stands.

Pine beetles, which are about half a centimetre long and feed largely on mature lodgepole and limber pines, had burrowed under the bark to build tunnel-like egg galleries. When the larvae hatched, they bored holes out through the bark and, in the summer, went on to attack other trees. Lethal is the blue-stain fungus that the beetle carried; it disrupted the water flow within the trees and eventually turned them blood-red. As the trees die, their colour fades to orange, then grey.

The infestation in B.C. is unprecedented and the beetles are moving to Alberta and the United States, said Allan Carroll, a scientist with the federal Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria.

Although the pine beetle is indigenous to the area, a perfect storm of factors set the stage for the catastrophe.

"We've inadvertently grown a mountain pine beetle smorgasbord," Dr. Carroll said.

Officials have been successful at forest-fire suppression, he said. The forestry industry in B.C. had bypassed lodgepole pine stands, allowing more trees to become the mature, preferred hosts for the beetles.

Since 1910, the total area of mature pine has tripled in the province.

And in the last century, the B.C. Interior has experienced an average minimum winter temperature jump of between 2.2 C and 2.6 C. Cold snaps are the best natural enemy of the pine beetle.

Now, global warming seems to be making the beetle a permanent fixture in places the pest was never previously seen, Dr. Carroll said.

Pine beetles tend to swarm Alberta in 20-year cycles. Traditionally, during those times, the few affected trees have been cut and burned.

But the threat is more ominous now.

In 1998, 10 infested lodgepole pine trees were found in Banff National Park. Two years later, 25 infested trees were spotted north of Jasper National Park. Two years after that, the pests were detected in 25 trees in Canmore, east of Banff.

In the past year, about 19,000 trees have been attacked across Alberta.

The province is cutting and burning every infected tree and those that could be susceptible to the pest.

"We have taken the most aggressive approach we can to limit the mountain pine beetle in our province and beyond," David Coutts, Alberta's Minister of Sustainable Resource Development, told reporters over the weekend.

Some researchers warn that the pine beetle could jump to jack pines and spread through Canada's boreal forest and into the northern territories and through to the Maritimes.

That's why Alberta and British Columbia have just jointly announced $17-million in funding to tackle the scourge along their shared boundary before the beetle spreads farther.

Alberta will also set up a new advisory committee. The announcements come on the heels of the federal budget, which pledged $400-million in funding related to the pine beetle.

Back in Williams Lake, Mr. Rustad said the funding will be a big help, but he added that the magnitude of the crisis could have been avoided if aggressive action was taken sooner. Instead, environmentalists criticized the notion of cutting and burning forests while government officials kept waiting for cold weather that would kill the bugs, he said.

Nate Bello, who is the mayor of Quesnel just to the north, said he remembers seeing little pockets of red trees to the west of his community 10 or 15 years ago.

Now, the forestry sector in his area is looking at losing about half its allowable cut because of the pine beetle.

"I'm glad people from Alberta are getting a head start. It's something we didn't have," he said. "The signs were there. People said we should have moved quicker."(+)

Province has new tool against invasive plants

May 08 2006
Clearwater Times (http://www.clearwatertimes.com)

The Province has launched Canada's first web-based tool in the battle against invasive alien plants, Forests and Range Minister Rich Coleman and Agriculture and Lands Minister Pat Bell announced last week.

Left unchecked, invasive plants can cause crop and livestock losses, destroy wildlife habitat, crowd out endangered plant species and lower property values.

"Invasive alien plants threaten both our biodiversity and our economy," Coleman said. "Our timber and ranching industries depend on native species. Their loss due to the spread of non-native plants that are less valuable or even toxic puts these industries at risk. At the same time, alien plants push out native plants that sustain our wildlife and ecosystems."

The Invasive Alien Plants Program is a web-based data entry system and mapping tool. It will allow about 200 people working in government, industry and local weed committees to quickly and efficiently share information about where invasive plants are located, and what weed control treatments have been used. By sharing data, the agencies involved in invasive plant management will be able to prioritize work across B.C., prevent duplicated efforts and measure progress.

"This government is committed to working effectively and collaboratively on the problems of invasive plants," said Bell. "In 2004, we announced the Province would boost spending on invasive plants by over $3 million, to a total of $8 million over two years."

Agencies involved in the management of approximately 140 species of invasive plants in B.C. include the Ministries of Agriculture and Lands, Environment, Forests and Range, and Transportation as well as the Invasive Plant Council.

The government agencies form the Inter Ministry Invasive Plant Committee that manages invasive plants on Crown lands.

"This new web tool is a very positive development for all those involved in invasive plant issues," said Juliet Craig, co-ordinator of the Central Kootenay Invasive Plant Committee. "It gives all of us the ability to pull maps and find information whenever we need it, whether it's for conducting inventories, treatments or monitoring."

The public may access the application to produce maps showing the location of various weed species in B.C. The Invasive Alien Plant Program Application is available online at www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/invasive/

Watch out for ash borer beetle

BY MICK ZAWISLAK | Daily Herald Staff Writer | Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Travelers are asked to avoid bringing home more than fond memories as the camping season gears up.

A consortium of agencies led by the Morton Arboretum for a third year is on alert for the emerald ash borer, a stealthy yet lethal pest that may lurk in piles of firewood.

Responsible for killing or sickening more than 15 million ash trees in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Ontario, Canada, land managers throughout northern Illinois want to tighten the net before the exotic, metallic green beetle can establish itself here.

"Right now, one of the biggest issues out there is firewood transportation," said Al Zelaya, forestry crew chief for the Lake County forest preserves. "It's an unregulated industry."

Those hoping to thwart the beetle fear campers who buy firewood at stands in neighboring states may unwittingly introduce the ash borer to Illinois.

"There is a lot of vigilance and concern because these things seem to be all around us," said Gina Tedesco, spokeswoman for the Morton Arboretum in Lisle.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who secured $11 million in federal funds to combat the Asian longhorn beetle, was briefed last month on what could become the latest natural threat.

Durbin will discuss the ash borer on his local access cable show and plans discussions with Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar.

"It's not a problem yet in Illinois, but we know it will be," said Durbin spokeswoman Christina Angarola.

Meanwhile, forest preserve, park district, municipal and other officials continue the search.

For example, about $29,000 has been requested in the proposed Lake County forest preserve budget for tree maintenance. A public information program on the ash borer also is planned, and district leaders will hear more Friday regarding the potential regional impact.

"We probably will be doing more things in terms of (tree) inventory, trying to get a handle on our resources and the risk," Zayala said.

Last year, 160 "trap trees" were set at about 100 sites in DuPage, Will, Kendall, Kane, Lake, McHenry, Winnebago, Boone and parts of Cook counties. No borers were found, but that hasn't lessened the anxiety.

Ash trees are popular in residential settings because they grow quickly and are durable. Morton estimates 20 percent of all trees in the Chicago area's urban landscape are ash.

Developers turned to ash as a replacement for Dutch Elms, Zayala said, and new areas would be especially susceptible to the ash borer, he added.

"That's where it's going to be a big problem," he said.

The borer is small and hard to see. Larvae destroy trees from the inside out and the damage can take years to show.

The borer was first identified in the U.S. in 2002 in southeastern Michigan. Experts say it may have been in the Detroit area 10 to 15 years before then.

"That's the scary thing about this pest," Zayala said. It was found in Ohio in 2003 and northern Indiana in 2004.

It is believed to have arrived on wood packing material carried in cargo ships or airplanes originating in Asia.

Zayala urged Illinois residents to buy firewood locally or use up their supply on site if purchased elsewhere.

Trees dying from the top down, or D-shaped exit holes in the trunk or branches are indicators that should be reported to authorities.

mzawislak@dailyherald.com

Garlic Mustard Casts a Pall on the Forest

May 2, 2006 | Observatory | The New York Times
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

In drama, the uninvited visitor is a common plot device. Everyone is getting along swimmingly until a new character arrives and upsets the apple cart. Things quickly fall apart.

Garlic mustard, a tall weed native to Europe that was introduced to the United States in the late 1800's, is a bit like that uninvited visitor. Researchers have found that it disrupts a healthy relationship between hardwood tree seedlings and soil fungi, with results that can be disastrous for a forest.

Like other scientists, Kristina A. Stinson, who studies invasive plants as a research associate at the Harvard Forest, Harvard's ecology and conservation research center in Petersham, Mass., had noticed that native trees suffered in the presence of garlic mustard. "We thought their dependence on native fungi might play a role," Dr. Stinson said.

Many plants make use of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which form an elaborate network of filaments throughout the soil. These fungi are a diverse group, but they all have one thing in common: they help plants take up nutrients from the soil, getting carbon in return.

Garlic mustard is a member of the mustard family, "one of the very few families that do not need to associate with mycorrhizal fungi at all," Dr. Stinson said. These species produce chemicals that have antifungal properties. Native mustards have been around long enough, she suggested, that the mycorrhizal fungi have learned to live with them. But the fungi haven't had time to adapt to garlic mustard. "It basically is killing off the fungi," she said.

In a study using soils from a forest in Ontario, Dr. Stinson and colleagues found that sugar maple and other hardwood seedlings grew much slower when the soil came from an area infested with garlic mustard than from a mustard-free area. The findings are published in the journal Public Library of Science Biology.

In studying invasive species, scientists often see a direct effect. Invasive cane toads in Australia, for example, wipe out snakes and other predators that try to eat them. But garlic mustard displays a mechanism that, so far at least, appears to be unique. "It's really a demonstration of how 'the enemy of my friend is also my enemy,' " Dr. Stinson said. By killing fungi, "it's disrupting this longstanding native mutualism."

Garlic mustard has now spread through 30 states, from Maine to Oregon, and into Canada. "When this plant shows up in a forest, the tree species themselves that become the canopy are most at risk," Dr. Stinson said. "That could have tremendous impact by changing the composition of the forest."

While the effect might not be immediate, it will occur nonetheless. "Our experiment was on seedlings," Dr. Stinson said. "But those are the future generations of forests."

Salty Logs

Modern humans may consume too much sodium, but modern gorillas often find it hard to get enough. Tropical soils tend to be deficient in the mineral and, as a result, these and other forest-dwelling primates don't get much in the plants they eat.

So they supplement their diet in different ways. Lowland gorillas, for instance, are known to hang out in swampy areas in forest clearings where there are more sodium-rich plants. But mountain gorillas have been found to have a stranger source of sodium: rotting wood.

In addition to their regular diet of leaves, stems, bark and fruits, mountain gorillas for years have been observed to eat decayed stumps and logs. Other primates, including chimpanzees and mountain monkeys, are known to eat them, too.

Rotting wood doesn't have much protein or sugar, so the behavior puzzled. Jessica M. Rothman and her colleagues at Cornell University set out to see if there was a nutritional reason for it. They studied mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda.

As reported last week in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers found that the gorillas ate decayed wood at least once a month. The pieces eaten contained much higher amounts of sodium than the usual components of their diet, and logs and parts of stumps that the gorillas avoided had far less sodium than those that were consumed.

Bad for the Birds?

Most of the debate over genetically modified crops focuses on concerns about food safety and the potential effect of transgenic material on the environment.

But researchers in Britain have looked at a much narrower issue regarding the growing of herbicide-tolerant G.M. crops: their effect on partridges, sparrows, finches and other seed-eating birds that make their homes on farmlands.

The researchers report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that the use of broader-spectrum herbicides (chemicals that can kill just about everything except the food plant) on these crops can sharply reduce the amount of weed seeds, an important food source for the birds.

The researchers, from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other groups, used data from studies that compared transgenic and conventional crops and analyzed the results for the diets of 17 bird species. They found that with transgenic beets and oilseed rape (canola is a variant of it), there was significantly less weed seed available to most of the species.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, with transgenic corn there was more seed available, though the amount was significant for only seven of the bird species. While the broad-spectrum herbicide used for corn kills more types of weeds, it doesn't do as good a job of killing them as the herbicides used with conventional corn. (+)

The hots, for you-Climate change comes to town

From the City Newspaper website: rochester.gyrosite.com
POSTED ON MAY 3, 2006:
By Krestia DeGeorge

The planet is warming up. What does that mean for Rochester?

The short answer is that nobody really knows.

A climate is a complex thing. Change one little part of it and you may change the whole thing --- and in unpredictable ways. Still, that doesn't mean scientists can't make some sound educated guesses about what could happen. And if any of those guesses prove accurate, the Rochester of tomorrow could be a very different place from the one we know today.

Despite the complexity of all the systems involved, there are a few easy places to begin to understand the effects of climate change in Rochester.

When it comes to deducing what the weather of tomorrow might be like, it's helpful to start with the weather of today. That's where Dr. Jose Maliekal comes in. A professor at Brockport for the past 15 years, Maliekal has a PhD in meteorology, and focuses many of his classes on climatology and climate change. He's careful to point out the inherent uncertainty in making predictions based on current predictions.

Throughout the course of an interview with City Newspaper, he kept adding qualifiers like "You never know these things for sure" and "No one can say for sure." Part of that uncertainty comes from the fact that changing a single variable has the potential to result in multiple outcomes, some of them radically different from one another. Maliekal illustrates what he means with an example:

Say you have a temperature increase. Warming increases evaporation, pumping more moisture into the atmosphere. One of two things could happen to that water vapor. First, it could form low-lying clouds. Those clouds, in turn, would have a cooling effect, blocking radiation from the sun that would otherwise heat things up. In that case, such a change would be self-correcting.

But let's say that instead of forming low clouds, the extra water in the atmosphere forms high clouds. "High clouds tend to have a warming effect," says Maliekal, since they trap existing warmth and let more of the sun's rays in. That "could accelerate the warming trend we have in place," says Maliekal. Instead of self-correcting, the system would be self-reinforcing.

(A process similar to the latter scenario has contributed to the global warming now taking place, Maliekal says. Typically, the earth reflects about 30 percent of the sun's radiation into space. Some of that is reflected off the icy surface of glaciers. With glaciers around the planet receding as temperatures rise, there's less ice to reflect radiation, and more gets absorbed by the planet, further raising surface temperatures.)

It's complex possibilities like this that lead Maliekal to say that "no one can say for sure what is going to happen," before quickly adding "We do, however, have some reasonable hypotheses about what could happen."

So what are those hypotheses? Here's one of the more surprising ones: "Should the climate change, there is the possibility that lake effect would increase," says Maliekal.

Lake-effect snow is produced when there are extreme disparities in temperature between the lake water and the atmosphere above it, he explains. If the LakeOntario is storing more heat from the atmosphere during the spring and summer and losing less during the fall and winter, its overall temperature will be warmer.

That means that, assuming we still get periods of cold arctic air, there's a higher likelihood that the area will experience the temperature disparities that create lake effect snow. (Not everyone agrees with Maliekal on this point. In 2000 the University of Michigan's Peter Sousounis authored a paper suggesting that the temperature could rise high enough that even our cold spells might no longer be cold enough to trigger the lake effect.)

But there are plenty of other changes that are likely to be less pronounced, or less surprising.

Ice cover on the Great Lakes and smaller bodies of water is dwindling, for example. (With the exception of the shallow Erie, the Great Lakes rarely freeze over completely, but cover around the shorelines has been shrinking.) What does that mean? "No one can say for sure," says Maliekal.

The same is true for the yearly hydrological cycles the Great Lakes go through. The lakes tend to swell in the spring, with rains and snowmelt runoff, then ebb to seasonal lows in the autumn months.

"Studies have shown that in recent years there has been a shift in that pattern," says Maliekal. Both the spring rise and the fall drop are happening earlier in the year. And no one's sure what that trend might mean if it continues.

Other likely changes to the local environment come with more obvious consequences. For instance, Maliekal says that Rochester, like the rest of the Great LakesBasin, will become a drier place overall. That will lead to higher extremes, he says. We'll experience both "slightly prolonged droughts and increased flooding."

The higher temperatures and relatively scarcer availability of water will affect agriculture, but it will also affect water levels in the Great Lakes. They could drop by as much as 3 feet in the next 50 years.

That change may, in fact, be the one that has the biggest impact on daily human activity in the Great Lakes basin. Ironically, while ocean shorelines around the world will be encroaching on human settlements as sea levels rise, here in the Great Lakes water levels will likely fall. In fact, Environment Canada, the branch of the Canadian government that tracks these things, estimates that the outflow of the St. Lawrence River, which drains all of the Great Lakes basin, could diminish by as much 20 percent.

The reason for the divergent fate of coastlines between oceans and inland bodies of fresh water like the Great Lakes is that the lakes are well above sea level (LakeOntario's elevation is 243 feet). And they won't receive any outflow from the melting glaciers and polar ice caps that will swell the world's oceans. None of those are in the Great Lakes' watershed.

And while droughts and lower water levels will become the norm, some of the water we still get could become more of a problem, since it will come more often in the form of extreme events, like thunderstorms. That, combined with a drier landscape, will mean more frequent and destructive flooding. With more floods and storms, erosion will become a larger problem than it is today, threatening things like agriculture and the value of waterfront homes.

Lower levels on the Great Lakes could also have an impact on commercial navigation. That in itself won't mean much to Rochester, which hasn't relied on commercial shipping as an important part of our economy in a long time. But the pressures on shipping could have some indirect impacts on this region. Environment Canada warns that dredging channels to keep commercial shipping moving apace might stir up dangerous toxic chemicals. Since plenty of the Great Lakes navigational infrastructure is upstream from Rochester, our community's LakeOntario public water intakes would be at risk.

Lower lake levels in the Great Lakes could also hit one other sector pretty hard: hydroelectric power generation. If water outflows decrease, massive projects like those along the Niagara River and Gorge near Buffalo and along the St. Lawrence in Massena could see their ability to generate power diminished, even while energy demands, if they follow today's trends, continue to spiral upward.

Besides the change in lake levels, there's one other area that stands to see a dramatic impact: the region's flora. In fact, plants are already starting to undergo changes as a result of warming that's already occurred.

Grapes are blooming an average of 6 days earlier than they did in the 1960s, while the average bloom dates for apples has shifted 8 days earlier over the same period. For lilacs, it's four days earlier. (At that rate, we'll be looking at an April Lilac Festival in the not-too-distant future.)

Plant ecologist David Wolfe has witnessed, and in some cases documented, these changes. Wolfe is a professor at Cornell's School of Agriculture, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that farmers are among the most concerned about these trends.

"Agriculture is very dependent on the weather," says Wolfe. "This might be a harmless thing," he adds, but his list of concerns seems to undermines that.

For starters, believe it or not, there's the problem of frost.

"One concern is that if the weather's getting better earlier, you could actually have increased frost damage," says Wolfe. Sound counterintuitive? It's not. While average temperatures are getting warmer, coaxing flowers to bloom earlier, that doesn't mean that extreme temperatures will become any less extreme. (Last week's temperatures that flirted with the freezing mark illustrate his point.)

That means that plants germinating and flowering ever earlier run an increasingly higher risk of being killed or damaged by late spring frosts.

The changing temperatures also hold the potential to play havoc on traditionally cold-weather crops in another way. It's a process called "vernalization." That's a fancy scientific term for something akin to hibernation in some plants.

"They need a certain number of days during the winter where the temperature remains low," says Wolfe. And those days have to be consecutive, not spread out over the course of a winter, Wolfe says. Exactly how many days, and what the threshold temperature is, varies from plant to plant, but the basics remain the same. The plant requires those conditions to produce the hormones it needs. If that doesn't happen, the plant's growth --- and the crop it yields --- can suffer. Apples are one prominent local crop that is subject to this biological requirement.

Blueberries and winter wheat are two other examples. And like the ever-earlier bloom dates, this effect is already happening now.

"For years with warmer winters we get lower apple yields," says Wolfe. "I think this past winter was [mild] enough to have that kind of effect."

The way in which global warming is occurring specifically in Western New York exacerbates this problem. While average temperatures have increased about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit globally in the past century, they're up by 1.8 degrees here. Look just at winter temperatures, though, and the increase in average temperatures jumps to 2.8 degrees, says Wolfe.

Of course, all that warming isn't all bad. There are a few positive outcomes to be had, like extended growing seasons, which may eventually allow crops historically grown further south to thrive here. And one industry in particular stands poised to reap a good deal of benefits:

"There's anecdotal evidence that this is actually good for grapes," says Wolfe.

While North America has a few native varieties of grape, he notes, these are too sweet to be favored by serious winemakers for anything more than a few novelty wines. Instead, the wine industry favors the traditional European strain of the fruit, vitus vinifera. In the past, that might have been a problem.

"They have a little trouble with our historical winter climate," Wolfe says of the vitus vinifera grape. Temperatures of 12 degrees below Fahrenheit or lower damage the vines of the imported variety, he explains.

"We've had very, very few winters where it got that cold" since the 1970s, says Wolfe. That's about the same time wine production really took off in the Finger Lakes, he says.

Still, the downsides for agriculture probably outweigh the benefits. One reason: in addition to the challenges to plants that are built into their own biology, warming will bring a whole host of changes that they may be ill-equipped to deal with.

One of the gravest potential threats along these lines is invasive species. Insects and plant diseases, which can wipe out species of plants, and other plants species, which can out-compete them, may be able to move into a territory as climatic conditions change.

"Insects, diseases, and weeds that are currently south of us will be with us," says Wolfe.

That's a potential threat to all plant species, but typical agricultural crops may be among the most vulnerable, since "a lot of crop species have been genetically programmed to remain a certain size," explains Wolfe. That genetic programming puts crop plants at a disadvantage when competing with wild plants, which can rapidly adapt to changing conditions.

To make matters worse, "weeds will benefit a lot from warming temperatures" and higher levels of carbon dioxide, says Wolfe. "People would have to use more herbicide, since weeds would be healthier," he adds, a practice that has its own environmental effects.

Another possible problem for plants is the change in precipitation patterns.

"It's more difficult to predict precipitation than temperature," says Wolfe. Like Maliekal, he expects to see a general decrease in store for this region, with the exception of extreme events during the summer months.

"Although you might get the same amount of water as in the past, if you get it all in a few chunks you could see some short-term droughts," he says. And in areas that are outside the lake-effect belt, a decrease in snow cover could deprive the soil of insulation. That's means more freezing and thawing through out the course of the winter. While that's not good for plants, it could be even more disruptive for microbes that live in the soil. Their complex relationship with plants who share their soil is still a mystery.

"We don't really know what it does, but it has an impact," he says.

Yet another potential problem for plants is the increased heat itself. Plants, especially cold-weather crops, can suffer from something called "heat stress," which as the name implies, weakens the plant and can potentially reduce crop yields. It also means the plants will require more water, hence more irrigation, even while supplies of the precious resource will be dwindling.

(Although not as well versed on the animal side of farming, Wolfe says that the dairy industry will face similar problems, since cattle like a cool climate and are also vulnerable to heat stress. Temperatures between 45 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit are optimal for milk production. "Farmers can probably adapt," he says, "but it becomes expensive.")

All this potential for change is troubling, since all of us depend on agriculture for our food.

Food costs may go up a bit, but Wolfe says he doesn't foresee huge price spikes. And some food production may actually come back to the area for a variety of reasons. In addition to higher fuel costs, which may make shipping fruit from California (not to mention New Zealand) less profitable, our area will have relatively more water than many other breadbasket regions.

And as the temperature continues to inch upward, crops' ranges will swing northward. (How does a nice crate of Finger Lakes oranges sound?) While many of us will not see such changes in our lifetimes, that doesn't mean farmers can ignore them for now.

"Farmers are going to have to adapt," which may include making expensive investments in new equipment, says Wolfe. "Farmers who are growing cabbage today might be growing something else."

That sounds fine in theory, but at some point farmers are going to have to make the leap from one crop to another, and the process could be messy. Farmers will essentially have to make guesses about whether to change crops and when.

"Some will guess right and some would guess wrong," he says. Those decisions may await farmers in the not-to-distant future, perhaps in as little as 10 to 20 years, Wolfe says.

Yet despite that assessment, he's still relatively upbeat about the future of agriculture here.

"I don't think it's totally doom and gloom for agriculture," says Wolfe. "It'd be a little more doom and gloom" for the southeastern United States, he says, but farmers here will be able to adapt for the most part.

"The agricultural community is poised to take advantage of this opportunity," he says.

If all this still sounds remote and abstract, consider the parallel effects that changes in vegetation will have on the average homeowner. Grass and other ornamental plants will be subject to the same problems of heat stress and its attendant demand for more watering. And they'll all face the same onslaught of healthier weeds and invasive plants, insects, and diseases. (More pesticide, anyone?)

Another nasty surprise that a warming trend has in store for us: "Almost certainly the allergy season will be coming earlier," says Wolfe, since major culprits like ragweed do quite well in heat.

It's less clear how natural ecosystems will handle the shift in climate.

"The fabric of our forests and natural ecosystems is going to change," says Wolfe. But it's difficult to predict exactly how.

"It'll happen slowly, I think," says Wolfe. "Over 10 to 50 years, we're likely to see a big change." That's the time period it takes for a new generation of trees to grow up.

Some of those changes may be subtle, but others probably will not. Maples, for instance, which are responsible for almost all the brilliant colors we witness here each fall, could be out-competed here. (Imagine a fall of dull brown and wan yellow.)

Like the farm, lawn, and garden ecosystems tended to by humans, natural areas face a host of new pest and competitors.

"They could become more and more dominated by invasive species," says Wolfe.

And like the climate itself, ecosystems are complex, which means small shifts can leave them vulnerable to big changes.

"One of the complicating factors is that every species is different" in its sensitivity to climatic changes, says Wolfe. "That creates the problem of synchrony." Wolfe is talking about the timing of the finely-tuned mechanisms that ecosystems evolved over time to sustain themselves. For example, if flowering plants continue to bloom earlier each year, but the bees they rely on to pollinate them don't adjust as quickly, those plants might not be able to reproduce.

"That would be devastating to a plant," Wolfe says. Such looming possibilities mean that ecosystems "could be pretty badly disrupted."
Hot flashes

What to expect --- when you're expecting climate change:

• More (or less) lake effect snow

• Uglier fall foliage

• Fewer (and less healthy) apples and apple orchards

• Better wine and more varieties of it

• A bigger, badder allergy season

• More expensive food

• More local food

• More floods

• More droughts

• More bugs

• Fewer (and more scraggly) lawns

• Scarcer water

• Less hydroelectric power

Abitibi’s foreign fibre sale worries local leaders

By KELLY LOUISEIZE

Near Thunder Bay – The sale of large tracts of private forest land to a United States forest management company has unions, mayors and community leaders worried about the economic and environmental well-being of Canadian forests and their regions.

Abitibi Consolidated’s decision to sell off 196,000 hectares of its privately-owned timberlands near Thunder Bay for $55 million to North Star Forest Ltd., a subsidiary of Wagner Forest Management Ltd., may be a sign of a growing trend, according to an industry official.

The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union wants the fibre to stay in Canada so it can help to create and sustain jobs.

Kenora Mayor David Canfield wants whatever fibre is collected from Abitibi’s private and Crown land to be allocated to the Kenora Forest Product mill for their expansion, should their mill become idle. In other words, he wants the region’s supply to stay in the region.

Tembec Inc. and Domtar Inc. will be selling land in the Spruce Falls area, which is in the middle of the Gorden forests. Alain Guindon, president of the Gorden Cosens Survival Committee, wants the fibre to be processed in the area as well.

Natural Resources Minister David Ramsay confirms multi-national lumber companies are increasingly buying up private land in Ontario.

Eighty-seven per cent of the province’s land is Crown-owned, according to Ramsay, who adds the percentage of Northern Ontario land owned by the Crown is higher still.

“There are some privately held forest companies purchasing land, but there is not much of it out there,” he says.

Canadian fibre being bought up by multi-nationals with no vested interest in providing jobs or long-term growth for the province, must be a regional concern, officials say.

“It concerns me too,” Ramsay says.

That was the reason the ministry entered into a bidding process for Abitibi’s private timberlands outside Thunder Bay.

“We were in the game,” Ramsay says. “I didn’t let this go, we tried to purchase it.”

The National Bank of Canada put in a higher bid than what was accepted. The terms and conditions, including environmental assessment considerations, attached to the sale prevented the province from becoming the successful bidder, he says. Abitibi needed the transaction completed by the end of their fiscal year, which coincides with the calendar year. Time ran out.
Ramsay says he will be assessing the private lands in northeastern Ontario to determine the market value and whether bidding is necessary.

The first sales of Crown land to private interests took place with the construction of this country’s railways. Today, companies usually acquire the property today by purchasing existing plant operations.

www.mnr.gov.on.ca
www.abitibiconsolidated.com

Global warming already visible

MARIAN GAIL BROWN mgbrown@ctpost.com | Connecticut Post Online

Connecticut's fall foliage — a kaleidoscope of crimson, orange and gold-tinted leaves — would vanish. Forget tapping the maples for syrup. That industry would die here.

Portions of Interstate 95 might be underwater unless the state commits to raising them. And the same holds true for some of Metro-North's most low-lying tracks hugging the coastline and an untold number of buildings with historic preservation status.

Those are among the scenarios that scientists and the Environmental Protection Agency paint about the possible effects of global warming in Connecticut in coming decades.

But the predictions aren't all bad.

Connecticut farmers might raise a wider variety of fruit and vegetables, including some types never before contemplated in the Constitution State because the growing season would lengthen.

And snowbirds — those people who flee the North to winter in Florida — might never leave Connecticut. That's because the climate here might resemble Georgia's warmth, even in the dead of January.

Many scientists claim that global warming — which has pushed the average global surface temperature from 56.6 degrees in 1880 to 57.96 degrees in 2005 — is caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, trapped in the atmosphere.

Naturally occurring carbon dioxide keeps the planet warm enough to be livable. But too much carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, many scientists and the EPA warn, is amplifying the Earth's natural greenhouse tendencies.

"Since the pre-industrial era, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased more than 30 percent," the EPA states in "Climate Change and Connecticut," the agency's 2000 assessment of how global warming might affect Connecticut.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that humankind is leaving a "discernible" influence on climate that is "unlikely to be entirely natural in origin." The IPCC went so far as to state in a recent report that "there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."

Scientists, researchers and environmentalists who ascribe to the IPCC's viewpoint say evidence that the planet is heating up and will continue to become warmer in some places and (ironically) cooler in others.

The state Department of Environmental Protection statistics show that sea surface temperatures along New England's southern coast and off Long Island Sound rose 1.6 degrees between 1880 and 2001. The DEP's figures are based on records that date back to the shipping industry more than a century ago, as well as the DEP's own Long Island Sound trawling studies.

Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies Dean Gus Speth believes it's still possible to reverse or slow some of the harshest global warming projections. That's why he wrote "Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment," to provide a roadmap to get on with that task.

Speth's interest in the environment dates back to 1969 when he helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was just out of law school and anxious to make a positive mark on the environment. Through more than a dozen lawsuits, Speth and the NRDC challenged strip-mining and forest clear-cutting.

Those environmental lawsuits prompted President Jimmy Carter to appoint Speth to the Council on Environmental Quality, which drafted the country's first long-range assessment of how global warming' would affect the nation by 2000.

Many of the predictions in the council's 2000 Report to the President — about the level of greenhouse gas emissions, for instance — have come to pass, Speth notes with mixed emotions in his book.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest level in 420,000 years, Speth states in "Red Sky at Morning." Unless there is intervention soon, by the latter half of this century, Speth says, half of the nation's lands will no longer be able to sustain the kind of plants and animals that now inhabit them.

Some projections call for the maple and birch trees that enliven the fall foliage in Connecticut and New England to disappear entirely.

"Every projection on the future of forests in Connecticut show significant maple forests vanishing from the landscape, moving out to Canada," Speth says during an interview from his Yale office. "Ecological modeling indicates that if climate change is not slowed by the end of this century, it will largely eliminate maple trees, as well as kill New England's maple sugar industry.

"The last foliage season was a miserable one, colorwise," he says. "Although you can't take one season and extrapolate from that & the long-term evidence exists that this will impact our forests — whether we have them and what trees populate them."

Speth bases his views on research by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the U.S. National Assessment Synthesis Team and the federal Department of Energy's International Energy Outlook report. The EPA's 2000 report supports Seth's assessment on how Connecticut's foliage may change in decades to come. "Maple-dominated, hardwood forests could give way to forests dominated by oaks and conifers, species more tolerant of higher temperatures," according to the EPA's Climate and Policy Assessment Division. Moreover, "this change would diminish the brilliant autumn foliage as the contributions of maples declines," the EPA says, adding that statewide "as much as 30-to-60-percent of the hardwood forests could be replaced by warmer-climate forests with a mix of pines and hardwoods."

Lonny Lippsett, managing editor of Oceanus magazine at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, agrees.

"Those predictions about foliage are consistent with the theories I've seen in the literature," Lippsett says. "Global warming does not mean that trees will disappear, but it suggests that these maples would be replaced by other species that thrive in warmer climates." Warming water

The effects of global warming are not only on the land, but swirling in the air and the water.

Predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and findings from the Hadley Centre's climate model project that by 2100 because of greenhouse gases, Connecticut's average annual temperature may increase about 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

While Connecticut is expected to become a warmer state, authorities believe it will also be wetter. Experts predict annual precipitation will increase between 10 to 20 percent, with most of that uptick arriving in the winter in the form of snow.

Two times since 1976, in 1999 and 2002, water temperature on the bottom of Long Island Sound spiked higher than 69 degrees Fahrenheit.

Each spike corresponds with widespread lobster die-offs, followed by parasitic disease outbreaks that crippled the shellfish industry in Connecticut.

The DEP's annual fish census, conducted since the 1980s, shows crustaceans aren't the only creatures affected by warmer water. Winter flounder populations have plummeted more than 83 percent between 1980 and 2005.

"Experts believe that the trend toward warmer water temperatures has led to a decline of cold-water species like winter flounder," DEP Spokesman Dennis Schain says.

Commercial landings dropped 75 percent, from more than 1 million pounds of fish during that period to less than 250,000 pounds. And the recreational harvest fell 99.5 percent in those 25 years from a million fish to a paltry 5,000 pounds.

Research conducted by the University of Connecticut under a DEP grant shows that many native fish species, from winter flounder, to smelt and tomcod, are rapidly disappearing from Long Island Sound. At the same time, some 19 "warm water temperate" species, such as moonfish, hickory shad and northern sea robin and smallmouth flounder, which are not heavily fished in Connecticut, are thriving.

Budget commitments

On the national level, a total of 17 federal agencies are estimated to share more than $5 billion for climate change research. Currently, the EPA has an $18.6 million budget for climate change research, and is projected to have another $17.5 million under President Bush's 2007 budget request. Congress has yet to act on that request.

"The Bush Administration has an unparalleled financial, international and domestic commitment to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions," EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson says in the EPA's April greenhouse gas inventory report. Jennifer Wood, a spokeswoman for the EPA echoes Johnson's words. "The president has spoken repeatedly over the past five years on his view of climate change as a serious issue that must be addressed with global, long-term efforts, informed by the best available science."

It's easy to see that global warming is hot even outside the scientific and academic communities.

There's a documentary, "The Great Warming;" two heavy-hitter books, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" and Australian biologist Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers," and a movie and book about Al Gore's crusade against global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." Getting it wrong?

But not every scientist believes global warming is an alarming phenomenon.

Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT in Cambridge who studies climate change using satellites and ground radar in the tropics, says the ecological models are skewed because they don't adequately measure cloud cover, water vapor in the atmosphere or turbulence.

"The models fail because they all get precipitation wrong," Lindzen says. "They all get the amount and placement of clouds wrong. And getting it right is crucial to gauging the effect of carbon dioxide," Lindzen says, adding that his views are not in step with what politicians and environmentalists want to hear.

Lindzen's past research received funding from the EPA, the federal Department of Energy and NASA's Goddard Space Institute in New York. These days, his primary funding comes from the federal Department of Energy.

"To get funding today, scientists have to keep to the line that a severe problem is possible" because of global warming. "They don't have to endorse the alarmist view per se, but they can't firmly oppose it," Lindzen says. When researchers submit grant proposals, they'll say they want to model clouds or something innocuous like that that belies the nature of their research, he says. "We never had to do that before. When you say you want to look at the sensitivity of climate and the possibility of negative feedbacks, which are things that reduce greenhouse gases, then you are working on something that goes against the paradigm." Lindzen disputes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assertion that scientists now agree that human activity is forcing the levels of greenhouse gases way beyond what they naturally might be.

"I was at the IPCC and I do not recall them taking any survey among scientists to reach that conclusion," Lindzen says. "There were 2,000 scientists there, and I don't know they could make such a statement. I'd have an easier time believing that old Dentyne commercial that 'four-out-five dentists recommended it' than this. That commercial, at least, has some truth to it."

Greenhouse gases aren't to blame for climate change, Lindzen says. Changes in temperature are cyclical. Jeffrey P. Osleeb, chairman of the UConn Department of Geography, pays keen attention to global warming. His interest stems from five years of study on global warming's impact on infrastructure, such as transportation and buildings and his days as an economist with the U.S. Department of Energy, where he worked on large-scale energy models.

"Twenty-eight percent of Connecticut's population lives within 3 miles of the coastline," Osleeb says. "As the sea level rises, what we will be seeing in Connecticut is a dramatic change in the coastline. This will all happen not hundreds of years from now but within this century there will be a narrowing of the state by some hundreds of yards. It's probable that communities that aren't coastal now will become so."

Sea levels are projected to rise as global warming continues because the polar ice caps, which for centuries reflected solar energy, are melting. And glaciers are sliding into the oceans, raising their levels, like ice cubes dropped into a glass.

Sea levels are predicted to rise 3 feet or more along much of the Connecticut and the New England coastline, flooding, then inundating, and in some cases, obliterating whole swaths of land.

The EPA's models of Connecticut and its coastline already have documented a sea-level rise of about 8 inches per century, and its long-range forecast for 2100 indicates that Connecticut's sea level "is likely to rise another 22 inches."

Just a 2-foot rise along Long Island Sound by the end of the century means "buildings along the coast would be underwater. And some highways, too," Osleeb says, citing research by NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Interstate 95 is a good candidate for being inundated underwater in parts."

Osleeb is seeking a $3 million grant as part of the Surface Area Flood Evaluation Coastal Optimization and Analysis of Structural Technologies and Storms, a Federal Emergency Management Administration program. The money will allow researchers to determine which buildings and infrastructure are threatened by global warming and develop plans that states can use to address them.

"Some highways and railroads might need to be elevated or moved. It's the same thing for buildings, except that where you are dealing with historic ones, the question is if they can't be raised can they or should they be moved," Osleeb says. "With any of this remediation, there will be significant cost. It's a bit like triage, you have to decide what you can save and what you want to save and at what cost."

What's the price tag for global-warming-proof government facilities, historic structures and interstate highways?

"It'll be billions," Osleeb says. "And maybe a lot more than that — expended to deal with this problem. And the planning for this, the scenarios we need to put together with all of the inventory of roads, transportation that's vulnerable and scenarios, needs to begin soon — within the next 10 years — if we want to address this in a planned, coordinated fashion."

Osleeb bristles at Lindzen's assertions that scientists are exaggerating global warming's impact on climate change.

"First and foremost, there are very few scientists who say that the impacts are being exaggerated. Certainly not the scientists" on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Osleeb says. "If I am wrong, it will mean that the United States has spent resources incorrectly. If they are wrong, it could mean the end of human life as we know it. Which is the greater risk?"(+)

Terrace Bay: Costs discourage exports

Apr. 29, 2006. 07:49 AM | RICK WESTHEAD | BUSINESS REPORTER

Terrace Bay, Ont.— For the better part of 37 years, millwright Tom Long watched fleets of trucks and rail cars leave the Neenah Paper mill on the outskirts of this remote northern Ontario town, carting processed pulp and paper to buyers as far away as Oklahoma and Alabama.

Long would often watch the daily procession and wonder why the payloads weren't shipped beyond North America.

"The only thing you hear about nowadays is how much building China is doing," said Long, who retired last year after working at Neenah Paper for 37 years.

"They've got a billion people in China, and we're making fibre for Kleenex," the 56-year-old said. "All you have to do is get them to blow their nose with our stuff and we'd do great."

Sitting in a coffee shop in Terrace Bay, Long has just summed up an issue that has stumped Canada's forest-industry leaders and politicians alike: why has Canada failed to develop an overseas market for lumber and pulp and paper?

One problem is extreme transportation costs, said Don Campbell, vice-president and resident manager of Bowater Canadian Forest Product Inc.'s Thunder Bay operations, which include a sawmill and pulp and paper mill. Shipping to some of Bowater's customers in Korea — by rail to Vancouver and then by boat — can cost more than twice as much as getting the product to North American buyers.

But the benefits of increased overseas sales are obvious.

By selling more forestry products to countries such as China, India and Korea, Canada would be less dependent on the giant U.S. market. That might ease any ill effects of the newly signed Canada-U.S. softwood-lumber agreement.

Under the terms of the new agreement, Canadians will face quotas on U.S. sales when prices are low, although not when prices are high.

In an interview yesterday, Ontario Minister of Natural Resources David Ramsay pointed out that, unlike Canada's previous softwood-lumber situation, the new agreement allows room for Canadian exports to grow in lockstep with U.S. demand for timber.

British Columbia has been the most proactive province in pursuing markets beyond the United States, forest industry experts said. Three weeks ago, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell announced the province would spend $10.5 million to promote the province's wood around the world.

"We have to reduce our dependency on the American marketplace," Campbell said at the time. "If we don't reach to China, Korea and India, I can tell you, Russia and South America will be going there, and we'll have all sorts of competitors."

In 2002, meanwhile, Natural Resources Canada announced the so-called Canadian Wood Export Program, which provides for $35 million worth of public money over five years. Even so, Ramsay said fast-growing markets such as China's haven't figured in his plans.

`They've got a billion people in China, and we're making fibre for Kleenex'

Tom Long, retired millwright

"The U.S. is our primary market; we've been trying to get that straightened out," he said.

Still, Industry Canada statistics suggest that Campbell's marketing dollars are well spent — at least in parts of the world.

While the value of softwood lumber Canada has exported to its three biggest customers — the U.S., Japan and the U.K. — has dropped in each case over the past four years, lesser-known markets showed strong gains over the same time period.

For instance, Canada in 2005 exported $8.6 billion worth of softwood timber to the U.S., down 9 per cent decline from 2001. The $1 billion in lumber sold to Japan was down 30 per cent over the same period, while sales to the U.K. slipped 8 per cent to $64 million.

China, the fourth-biggest purchaser, bought $55 million worth of lumber from Canada last year, nearly double the 2001 figure. Other countries that have bought much more Canadian softwood in recent years include the Philippines ($40 million), South Korea ($27 million) and Mexico ($8 million).

To be sure, some long-time forest industry workers see reasons why Canadian wood isn't coveted overseas.

For starters, labour costs in Canada are more than in countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, adding to the final price. Moreover, in more temperate climates like Brazil's, it takes just 10 years for a newly planted tree to become harvestable, said Ron Falzetta, another retired Neenah Paper worker.

"It's at least five times that in Canada," Falzetta said. "We maybe have 90 days a year where there's guaranteed to be no frost. That's a short growing season."

Still, Falzetta and others said Canada can compete with other pulp and paper producers on quality.

Many of the trees Neenah Paper harvests are swamp spruce trees.

"After 50 years, those trees aren't any bigger than this," Falzetta said, putting his fists side by side.

"The rings are so close together you can't even see between them. That makes for strong paper."

Some industry officials said the forest sector is making strides toward helping it become less dependent on the U.S. For instance, instead of churning out two-by-four studs, some mills now focus on producing door frames and joints.

Some Ontario mills are in the process of producing laminated beams, which are coveted in earthquake-prone Japan.(+)

Domtar chief: "Canada has lost edge in forestry"

LYNN MOORE | The Gazette; CP contributed to this report
Friday, April 28, 2006

Domtar CEO Raymond Royer says the strong loonie has hammered his industry.

Canada is losing its advantages as a forest-products producing country, Domtar Inc. shareholders were told yesterday as the Montreal-based multinational reported a first-quarter net loss of $24 million.

The soaring Canadian dollar plus stiff competition from countries where trees grow quickly and wages are low form just part of the gloomy picture, CEO Raymond Royer said during the company's annual meeting.

"The strengths on which the Canadian industry was built - inexpensive and abundant fibre and energy - no longer exist. Canada has become high cost compared to the rest of the world," he said.

And Domtar - which last November announced it would slash 1,800 jobs, close some Canadian operations and eliminate 17 per cent of its annual paper production - is responding by taking its production out of Canada and closer to its U.S. market.

Domtar's paper business - mainly office and commercial printing and publication papers - is its most important segment, representing about 61 per cent of its sales.

About 65 per cent of its paper is produced in the U.S. and 90 per cent of its sales are made to U.S. customers.

Before 2001, almost all of Domtar's mills were located in Canada. Now, there are only "one and one-half," the major one being in Windsor, which can supply 75 per cent of the Canadian market, reporters were told.

A pulp mill in Lebel sur Quevillon was shut indefinitely in November because of "economic conditions." Unless savings amounting to about $120 per tonne are found, the mill will not be viable, Royer told reporters.

Earlier, Quevillon's mayor and plant workers urged the company and its shareholders to get the mill back on line.

At Quevillon, fibre and labour costs alone cost $510 per tonne - excluding processing costs - while similar market pulp from Canada's competitors can be had for about $600 per tonne, Royer told the town's mayor and shareholders.

Domtar has paid $204-million in contested softwood lumber duties since the dispute began in 2002. Anticipating a possible settlement of the dispute yesterday, Royer said that should 80 per cent of that be returned to Domtar, "it would go straight to the bottom line."

The cash would lower the company's debt-to-equity ratio from 58 per cent to 55 per cent, he said.

Domtar's $52-million decrease in operating profit was largely attributable to a $33-million negative impact of a strong Canadian dollar, higher prices for energy and freight as well as lower average selling prices and shipments for lumber products, the company said.

Higher average selling prices for paper and pulp, higher paper shipments and lower softwood lumber duties helped offset the negative forces at play during the quarter, the company said.

Royer pointed out that 15 pulp and paper mills have closed in recent months in Canada, and a smaller number in the United States, cutting supply.

"We have a better balance between supply and demand, and I think this is now translated in prices," Royer said. "We are seeing price increases we have not seen in a long time."

Domtar's first-quarter loss reversed a $10-million profit in the same quarter last year, but the company has lost money on an annual basis for three years.

The firm said its loss amounted to 10 cents per share diluted, compared with net earnings of 4 cents per share in the year-earlier period. That was better than an average analyst forecast of 16 cents per share.

lmoore@thegazette.canwest.com

What is the value of a tree?

from the April 26, 2006 edition
Antoinette Campbell loses an oak: Her a/c bill goes up $120 a month - the toll on her city is even bigger.

By Ethan Gilsdorf|Christian Science Monitor

URBAN DEFORESTATION: Heavy forest in Washington, D.C., decreased by 64 percent between 1973 (top) and 1997 (bottom). Before and after maps show that forested areas (in green) once covered a third of the district but now cover only a tenth.

Antoinette Campbell was justifiably shocked when city workers mistakenly chainsawed a 60-foot oak tree last May that shaded the eastern facade of her Washington, D.C., home.

"It was a personal something I had with that tree," says Ms. Campbell.

Besides the emotional distress, the error had an unexpected consequence: She noticed her air conditioner began running a couple hours earlier each morning.

Conventional wisdom is that just one shady tree can save a homeowner $80 a year in energy costs, but Campbell claims her bills skyrocketed once the oak disappeared - up to $120 more some months.

Yes, humble street trees cool the air, reduce pollution, and absorb storm-water runoff, say forestry experts. But the benefits aren't only ecological, they say. Property values are 7 percent to 25 percent higher for houses surrounded by trees. Consumers spend up to 13 percent more at shops near green landscapes. One study even suggests patients who can see trees out their windows are hospitalized, on average, 8 percent fewer days.

Events around the country for Friday's National Arbor Day will highlight the fact that citizens and civic leaders are finally investing in the so-called "urban tree canopy."

But efforts like these aren't a moment too soon. Overall, urban trees in America are threatened, says Deborah Gangloff, executive director of American Forests. "Every city we've looked at, about three dozen, shows a decline of about 30 percent of the urban tree canopy in the past 10 to 15 years," she says. In some cities, the loss from disease, development, and neglect has been catastrophic. In Washington, D.C., for example, 64 percent of heavily forested areas disappeared between 1973 and 1997 - forest that once covered a third of the district now covers a tenth.

And the creep of suburban sprawl seems unstoppable. In the next 50 years, total American land mass reclassified from forest to urban is expected to equal the size of Montana, suggests US Forest Service data. To reverse the trend, cities like Jacksonville, Fla., San Francisco, Albuquerque, N.M., Des Moines, Iowa, and Indianapolis have ambitious reforestation plans. Los Angeles wants to plant 1 million trees. The Sacramento region has a goal to double the urban canopy in 40 years; Baltimore plans to double its own a decade sooner. Washington, D.C. is partnering with tree-planting groups and nonprofits like the Casey Trees Endowment Fund, an organization with a $50 million grant to combat the precipitous canopy decline.

The fund's urban forester program trains volunteers like Campbell, who lost her oak, to conduct on-site censuses that, combined, will locate, measure, and identify every tree in the city. The data is crunched by a US Forest Service computer model, which produces a precise environmental and economic value for each tree. For example: A 50-foot American linden at the corner of Potomac Ave. and E Street in the southeast quadrant of Washington stores 1,476 kilograms of carbon and removes 124 grams of sulfur dioxide from the atmosphere each year. To remove that same amount of pollution would otherwise cost society $5.44 annually. Multiply that by D.C.'s 1.9 million trees and the benefits add up.

Urban trees also reduce the runoff of pollutants into waterways, a problem caused by impervious surfaces like concrete. Foliage slows rain so it gets absorbed better, rather than overwhelming drainage systems, explains Ms. Gangloff. For example, a 2005 study of municipal trees in Boulder, Colo., found that the average tree intercepts 1,271 gallons of precipitation annually, saving the city $523,311 in storm-water retention costs.

For cities struggling to meet the Environmental Protection Agency's air quality goals and build adequate wastewater treatment facilities, trees offer high return on investment. The Boulder report estimates the city gets a $3.67 return on every dollar spent on the urban forest.

"It's worth considering the value of these trees when making policy decisions," explains Dan Smith, a Casey Trees spokesman. The value of tree maintenance, for example, can't be minimized, he says, because a 30-inch-diameter tree removes 70 times more pollution per year than a 3-inch tree does. This is why he's unhappy that over the past five years, federal support of urban greening - such as tree-cover analysis, goal-setting, and technical support - has declined.

Like the urban trees themselves, the programs must also be nurtured. And that's nothing to shake a stick at.(+)

Walk in woods shows greed running rampant

By Ben Parfitt | Mar 26 2006 | BCNG Portals

A long-time logger I know once quipped that “greed and stupidity make a lethal cocktail and this industry’s been drinking doubles for a long time.”

These words took on new meaning for me recently while touring two radically different forestry operations a half-hour drive’s east of Prince George, near the eastern front of the pine-beetle outbreak now sweeping through the Interior.

These days, Prince George is awash in wood. Trucks laden with logs are everywhere, coming into the city from all directions and, in some cases, heading out because so many trees are coming down that not even milling powerhouses like Prince George can consume them all.

The first site lay just south of the Yellowhead Highway, off a logging road covered in fresh snow. Driving up the crystalline corridor where a moose had cut a fresh trail earlier that morning, small-scale logger Dave Jorgenson pointed to a thick stand of towering trees.

“That’s what I logged.” Down a thin skid trail, Jorgenson stopped to explain how he had taken roughly 1,000 trees out of this forest, 95 per cent of them killed earlier by beetles. The fruit of that labor now lay by the logging road in neat rows beside Jorgenson’s idled green forwarder.

However, he wasn’t so much interested in what he’d logged as what he’d left behind.
Following logging, three-quarters of the trees remained untouched, many of them tall, commercially prized spruce. And climbing up out of the shade rose other young spruce and balsam trees.

After driving five minutes east, we veered north into a clearcut that branched in so many directions it defied description.

Jorgenson reckoned at least 50,000 trees had come down in this now-barren landscape, enough wood to build a major subdivision. All the trees here were allegedly “salvaged” to extract economic value before the “pine beetle-attacked” trees lost their use for lumber or pulp.

The trouble was many of the trees were perfectly healthy spruce trees. Greed had trumped common sense.

As we passed by a long deck of stacked logs, all of them spruce, not a pine among them, he shook his head. “If they’re logging a spruce tree right now, that’s a pine tree they’re not logging. And 10 to 15 years down the road when that pine tree is rotting, there won’t be that spruce tree either.”

If all the forests those marauding beetles are attacking these days were homogenous tracts of pine trees, then the massive salvage logging operation now underway on public lands might make sense.

But as work by scientists with the Canadian Forest Service, B.C.’s Ministry of Forests and the University of Northern British Columbia is showing, just over one-quarter of forests attacked by the pests are comprised of trees that are 80 per cent or more pine.

This means the vast majority of stands now being salvage logged have some pine in them but are also comprised of other trees, like spruce in the north and fir in the south.

In fact, in many attacked stands almost all the trees are non-pine, while in others a significant minority of trees are non-pine and perfectly healthy.

Such a continuum should dictate very different approaches to logging. Instead, a cookie-cutter approach is used.

Clearcuts race across the landscape - clearcuts where perfectly healthy trees are logged and vigorously growing young trees in the understorey are mowed down as well, thus denying future generations wood - all on the specious grounds the forest is dead and must be salvaged before losing its value.

If a concerted effort was made to put a stop to the clear-cutting of so-called mixed forests, it is interesting to note the province might not have to ratchet up Interior logging rates to today’s record highs.

Nor might many Interior communities be faced with the humbling prospect of precipitous declines in future logging rates, the price paid for today’s over-consumption.

For the sake of a saner and more sustainable future, let’s hope provincial Forests Minister Rich Coleman listens to what forest scientists are saying.

Ben Parfitt is resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ BC Office and author of Battling the Beetle: Taking Action to Restore British Columbia’s Forests.(+)

Satellite photos show one-third of forests chopped up by industry: report

By BOB WEBER | Canoe | March 21, 2006

EDMONTON (CP) - Roads, logging, energy development and other industrial activities have already chopped up almost one-third of Canada's forests, according to a report to be released Wednesday by Global Forest Watch.

In a report compiled from more than 1,000 NASA satellite photos, the organization found that nearly all intact forest left in Canada was in the territories and the northern parts of the provinces. Nearly two-thirds of that undisturbed forest was found in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and the Northwest Territories.

Alberta, with only four per cent of Canada's intact forest, has allowed activity in nearly all its woodlands, the report found.

It's the first time a study has taken a uniform look at how much untouched forest is left and where it's located, said Forest Watch director Peter Lee.

"There've been many regional studies, but nothing that's been done nationwide," he said.

"Government and industry do not ask those kinds of questions. They don't want to know the answer."

Lee's report used Landsat photos with enough detail to pick out objects 28 metres in size. It defined an intact forest as an untouched area of at least 100 square kilometres in the northern boreal forest and 50 square kilometres in the temperate forests of the Maritimes, southern Ontario and B.C.

That may seem like a high standard, but Lee said it depends on the context.

"If you're a woodland caribou, it's not very high. If you're a grizzly bear, it's not very high."

In all, the report examined about 6.5 million square kilometres of forest.

Alberta's forests have suffered the heaviest industrial impact, the report found. Only seven of 63 management areas still have more than half the forest intact.

The activity has had predictable results on wildlife habitat.

Less than half of Alberta's woodland caribou habitat and only one-quarter of its grizzly bear range still contain intact forest sections.

"Everybody is aware of how rapidly Alberta is proceeding with industrial development in its forests," said Lee.

Forestry and energy development are a "double whammy" in the province, he said.

Still, the report found that 70 per cent of Canada's forests remain whole and healthy.

Lee said the data can be used to monitor changes in the forest landscape. The information is also useful to environmental groups wanting to develop habitat protection campaigns and to forestry companies working towards environmental certification. (+)

BC Losing Beetle Battle

By Brennan Clarke | Saanich News | Mar 17 2006

In the theatre of war, most battles are fought to be won or lost. But for public officials charged with fighting the province's pine beetle epidemic, the name of the game is damage control.

Just seven years ago, the province's mountain pine beetle infestation was limited to 164,000 hectares. By 2002, the pest had ravaged close to two million hectares and last summer the total amount of affected forest topped 8.7 million hectares.

"Most of the mature pine forest in the Interior is now engaged," said Rod DeBoice, B.C.'s provincial beetle co-ordinator. "It's been an exponential increase."

While the province isn't ready to admit defeat, DeBoice admitted that the best chance of slowing the destruction - barring a sudden reversal of the decade-long trend toward unseasonably warm winters - will come when the voracious little creatures simply run out of trees to eat.

"Most natural epidemics end up eating themselves out of the host," said DeBoice, who is known to his colleagues as the "beetle boss."

"Younger pine forests are not susceptible and by 2013, 80 per cent of what we call mature pine forests will have been destroyed."

Rather than trying to stop the spread of mountain pine beetle west of the Rocky Mountains, those efforts last year shifted east of the Rockies as researchers discovered pockets of mountain pine beetle in Peace River country on both sides of the B.C.-Alberta border.

"In terms of the actual battle, most of that is now taking place in the Peace District where there's a small scattering of beetles east of the Rockies," said Bill Riel, a researcher with the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria.

"We're pretty confident we're not going to be able to stop them in B.C. There isn't really much we can do about it."

Given the sheer magnitude of the problem, cutting down infested trees isn't a viable option, Riel said. Not only would it be impossible for even the most radical cutting program to keep pace with the infestation, flooding the lumber market with millions of hectares of additional lumber could have serious economic consequences.

"Those are socio-economic issues that have to be dealt with at the political level," he said.

Pine beetle researchers are still trying to figure out how the tiny insect, which has trouble surviving in sub-zero temperatures managed to traverse Canada's highest mountain range.

But the leading theory, said Riel, it that beetle populations have designated fliers that find their way into air currents high above the forest where winds carry them for hundreds of kilometres.

"They way they move is by flight and one theory is that some of them are programmed to try and get up above the canopy for what we call long-distance dispersal," he said. "They become like a particulate."

The problem has even caught the attention of the U.S. Forest Service, according to an article that appeared in the Washington Post earlier this month.

The article said U.S. Forest Service officials are "watching warily as the outbreak spreads," but noted that the United States is less vulnerable because it lacks the "seamless forest of lodgepole pines that are a highway for the beetle in Canada."

Colder temperatures may help keep the pine beetle at bay on the east side of the Rockies, Riel said.

"That's why we have a chance to control it there," he said. "They're in some areas, but they're not doing exceptionally well."

So far, Mother Nature hasn't co-operated. Environment Canada reported this week that the 2005-06 winter was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1948. Temperatures for December 2005 through February 2006 were 3.9 degrees Celsius higher than normal. December in Victoria saw the mean daily temperature at five degrees Celsius, a full degree above the 30-year average, while the mean average in January was 6.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the norm of 3.8 degrees. While they're not experts in climate change, most pine beetle researches blame the bug's proliferation on global warming, Riel added.

"We're really looking at the whole climate change issue. We've seen very unusually favourable conditions for the beetle," he said. "They're showing up in places we haven't seen them before. They're sort of a canary in the coal mine."

Given the scope of the outbreak, DeBoice said it would take a severe cold snap to make a dent in the problem. Ideally, the cold weather would hit in the early fall or early spring, since the pine beetle goes into dormancy and produces a kind of internal anti-freeze that helps it withstand the coldest parts of the year.

The province remains determined to battle the beetle, but it's also taking a realistic approach to the problem that includes replanting, repairing damaged streams and forest ecosystems, recovering value from infested wood and retooling the economies of Interior communities that will no longer be able to depend on the timber supply.

The province committed $100 million last year which will be spent over the next three years. There's also $161 million in a fund called Forests for Tomorrow that will be doled out through the 2008-09 fiscal year and a $185-million fund called the Northern Development Initiative Trust that generates ongoing interest that can be used for pine beetle-related issues. (+)

Rash of wildfires hits state of Virginia

46 blazes break out across Va.; high winds, dry conditions cited
BY PETER BACQUE | TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER | Thursday, March 16, 2006

Wind-spurred wildfires flared up around the state yesterday, closing roads, forcing evacuations and prompting additional burning bans.

Officials shut state Route 30 in West Point for hours yesterday as fire departments from the region battled to subdue a fire at the Smurfit-Stone paper mill and clogged the highway with firefighting equipment.

The fire began in a yard where recyclable paper is stored, said West Point Police Chief William L. Hodges. That blaze kindled grass fires in the lawns of nearby homes, though no injuries or damage to structures were reported.

Residents fled in the face of a 50-acre fire in Gloucester County, while low humidity, strong winds and dry conditions sparked a 200-acre fire in Clarke County.

Firefighters were making progress at bringing the Clarke and Gloucester blazes under control late yesterday, officials said.

The day's high winds helped spawn the rash of fast-spreading fires, officials said. For instance, winds gusted as high as 41 mph in Richmond and 45 mph in Northern Virginia.

"A little tiny spark can grow quickly with these 20 to 25 mile per hour winds," said John Campbell, a spokesman for the state Department of Forestry.

Forty-six fires broke out during the day yesterday. So far this year, 577 wildfires have burned 3,732 acres in Virginia, not including fires in the national forests, the state forestry agency said.

In Richmond, firefighters battled a brush fire on Belle Isle yesterday, and on Tuesday two fires burned about 35 acres of woodlands in Chesterfield County.

"Virginia is more than 5 inches short on rainfall," said John Miller, director of resource protection for the state Forestry Department. "Combine this dry ground with the warm weather and the high winds . . . and you have the perfect recipe for wildfires."

Central Virginia has a chance of rain overnight tonight and again early next week, said Bill Sammler, the warning-coordination meteorologist with the Wakefield Weather Forecast Office. But "it's not looking like there are going to be any big rainmakers for us."

More than 30 firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service worked on the still burning 1,200-acre Quarry fire in Bedford County's steep terrain yesterday.

"We're having some smoke come up," said the service's Ted Coffman. "Parts of it are burning inside the [fire] lines."

Still, said Coffman, spokesman in Roanoke for the 1.8-million-acre George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, "We're lucky."

Chesapeake Fire Marshal W.K. Hibner Jr. announced a ban yesterday on all open burning in that city until further notice.

Chesapeake firefighters have extinguished two dozen brush fires so far this month, compared to three in the first half of March 2005. Fire officials said most of the fires have been caused by cigarettes or yard-debris burns that got out of control.

In Richmond County, the Department of Forestry used three bulldozers and help from local volunteer fire companies to contain a woodland fire.

"Because more than 90 percent of all wildfires are caused by humans," the Forestry Department's Miller said, "we're asking everyone to check the weather and think before burning anything."

Virginia has a 4 p.m. burn restriction in place from Feb. 15 to April 30. The law prohibits open-air fires before 4 p.m. and after midnight.

"People are still going out there to burn," Campbell said, "but just because you legally can do it, doesn't mean you should."

Deep low pressure over southeast Canada combined with high pressure across the mid-Atlantic states produced the strong dry winds yesterday, the National Weather Service explained, but the winds will subside today.

Richmond has received only traces of rain so far this month, and just 4.36 inches of rain since Jan. 1, putting the capital 4.15 inches below normal for the period, the Wakefield Weather Forecast Office said.

Contact staff writer Peter Bacqué at pbacque@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6813.
Times-Dispatch staff writers Bill Geroux, Lawrence Latané III, Andrew Petkofsky, Jamie C. Ruff and Carlos Santos contributed to this report.

Ash Borer invasion: The Emerald Ash Borer is destroying trees in four southwestern Ontario counties. And experts say the pest is heading this way

The Expositor (Brantford)| Wed 15 Mar 2006 | Page: C1 / Front | Section: Crossroads
Byline: John Paul Zronik | Dateline: BRANTFORD | Source: The Expositor

BRANTFORD - Just to the west, millions and millions of destructive Asian insects are laying waste thousands of ash trees in four counties.

And the pests, known as Emerald Ash Borers, are heading this way.

"I have no doubts it will continue to spread east," says Jerry Dowding, Emerald Ash Borer project manager with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. "It's an invasive insect. There are no known predators in North America."

Adult ash borers are long, slender and metallic green in colour, measuring between 8.5 and 13.5 millimetres. For their size, the insects do a lot of damage, killing infested trees in just two to three years.

Since its arrival in Canada, first documented in 2002, the Emerald Ash Borer has only shown an appetite for ash trees. According to Natural Resources Canada's Web site, more than one billion ash trees in the province could be threatened. In the U.S. and Canada, damage caused by the insect is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

It is thought the insects made their way to North America in wooden shipping crates while still in the larval stage via airplane or ship.

Essex County and Chatham-Kent are both under full quarantine because of ash borer infestation. Parts of both Elgin and Lambton counties are under partial quarantine, with full quarantines pending because of the bug's spread.

The quarantine means the movement of ash trees, including logs, firewood, lumber, wood chips, bark chips and other wood debris, out of infested municipalities is prohibited.

"We're talking hundreds of millions (of ash borers) in Essex County alone," Dowding says. "It's a primary tree killer, which means it attacks and kills healthy trees.

"We're finding it right up to Thamesville now."

Willfully violating the quarantine can result in fines of up to $250,000 or two years in jail.

CREEPY

As it creeps eastward, the insect moves closer to taking up residence in this area. Elgin County, already under partial quarantine, borders on Norfolk and is just one county removed from Brant.

Dowding said the ash borer could make its way to Brant County soon, but it could take years to get here.

"It could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week," Dowding says. "If someone moves infested firewood or logs, it could be on your doorstep tomorrow. If allowed to spread naturally, it could be years before it reaches Brant County."

Dowding says the movement of firewood played a big part in the bug's spread through Essex County. In firewood, the bug can fully develop and be transported over great distances. Researchers speculate its natural range to be one to two kilometres.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is charged with preventing the further spread of the insect in southwestern Ontario.

Dowding says the ash borer first appeared in Detroit, possibly between 10 and 15 years ago, near the city's airport. But it wasn't until 2002 that people realized what was killing ash trees in the area.

"Prior to that, no one took the time to investigate why all these trees were dying," Dowding says. "Up until (2002) people assumed it was a disease or drought.

"When we first found it, we knew nothing about it."

Two ash borers must have made it to adulthood in North America after a journey from Asia, as it takes two of the bugs to reproduce.

When it was discovered that a previously unknown metallic green insect was killing the ash trees, samples of the bug were sent around the world in hopes of identifying it. The insect's origins in Asia were eventually discovered, but it had no common name. A Michigan researcher dubbed it the Emerald Ash Borer.

Since 2002, the insect has spread into Windsor and on to other municipalities in southwestern Ontario.

Is the spread of the menacing insect under control?

"Definitely not," Dowding says. "What we're trying to do is slow the spread of this insect. We recognized from the outset that there was no way of stopping it."

A single infested ash tree can contain up to 10,000 insects, Dowding said. Not even cutting down ash trees in areas where the bug has been found would be enough to stop its spread.

In Canada and the U.S., governments and organizations are working to combat the spread, including the Canadian Forest Service, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and universities.

The Emerald Ash Borer has caused its share of problems south of the border as well, killing between eight and 10 million ash trees in U.S. states including Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.

"It's difficult to describe the spread because what we're finding out is that the insect is near impossible to identify in small numbers," Dowding says.

The ash borer can be in an area three to four years before people begin to realize that there's a problem.

As the insect spreads, Dowding says there's a chance a natural predator will find the ash borer a suitable source of food. He says a type of native wasp and woodpecker are showing interest in eating the pests. In Asia, natural predators keep the Ash Borer in check.

During winter months, the ash borers remain inside trees. This time of year, larva can be found five or six millimeters into the wood. Having gone through its larval stages, the grown Emerald Ash Borer emerges from the inside of trees in late May or early June. They then begin feeding on the leaves of ash trees. The adult leaves a D-shaped hole after exiting a tree.

Other native insects can kill ash trees, but not as fast as the ash borer. They also don't leave the characteristic D-shaped hole, but an oval or round one.

Adult Emerald Ash Borers only eat the foliage on ash trees, causing minimal damage. But in the larvae stage, the insect is devastating, feeding on the inner bark of trees and interrupting their ability to send nutrients and water to all parts of the tree.

Scott Porter, Brantford's urban forestry co-ordinator, says the city's parks and recreation department has taken a proactive approach in anticipation of the Emerald Ash Borer's arrival here.

"It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when this thing spreads," Porter says. "It just takes one piece of wood with a male and female in it for it to spread.

"If it does come... there's not really much you can do."

Porter says the city has just over 4,200 ash trees, not including those on woodlots or private property.

To alert residents of the ash borer's potential arrival, the city last year distributed flyers in hydro bills. It has also published information about the insect in its civic news publications and leisure activity guide.

The city employs two foresters. They, along with workers doing maintenance on city trees, are keeping an eye out for signs of the ash borer. Porter says the city is keeping the lines of communication open with Brant County, Six Nations and the Grand River Conservation Authority when it comes to the bug. Ash trees have also been taken off the city's planting list.

Clayton Thompson, Brant County's forestry officer, said he hasn't seen any signs of ash borer infestation in the county.

"It isn't in our area and probably won't be for some time if it comes at all," he says.

Thompson says some county residents are keeping an eye out for the ash borer. He recently responded to a call from a resident concerned they discovered an Emerald Ash Borer, but the insect turned out to be a millipede.

"It's always a good idea to keep an eye out for it, but its not here yet," Thompson says.

If the insect were to invade Brant, Thompson says the impact could be as devastating as in areas where it has taken up residence.

"It would probably be just as bad here as it would anywhere else," Thompson says. "We do have some young stands of ash in Brant, so they could affect those.

"But I don't expect to see one and I hope I don't."

Dowding said it's a good idea for everyone to keep an eye out for the bug.

"Everyone right across southern Ontario should be looking out for it," he says.

If people find evidence of an Emerald Ash Borer, Dowding says they should call 866-463-6017.